'Smoked marijuana before kidnapping girl': 'Calm' Delhi cab driver shows 'no remorse' after raping-killing 11-year-old
NEW DELHI: Stoned on marijuana and operating in the dead of night, a cab driver allegedly pulled an 10-year-old girl away from her sleeping parents on a south Delhi pavement.
He drove her to a desolate forest patch near the Faridabad-Gurugram border, raped her, strangled her with a piece of cloth, caved her chest in with a stone and buried her body under a pile of rocks — then returned to the city, changed his clothes on the roadside, scrubbed his car clean and picked up his next passenger, police said.
The accused, Bashu Kumar Singh, 29, a Bihar native who had been driving for app-based cab aggregators in the Delhi-NCR region for nearly five years, was arrested around 11 am on June 22 from Vikaspuri in west Delhi — roughly six hours after the crime — following a manhunt involving nearly 20 police teams and footage from over 200 CCTV cameras.
The abduction
The girl was sleeping beside her parents, both daily-wage labourers, on a pavement near Chattarpur metro station in Mehrauli when Singh allegedly pulled up and parked his white Wagon R hatchback nearby.
Police said he observed the family for a period before allegedly dragging the child into the vehicle around 4.15 am on Monday.
Her father woke up moments later to find his daughter gone and a vehicle speeding away. He called the police control room at 4.58 am. A kidnapping case was registered and a large-scale search operation launched immediately.
The crime
During interrogation, Singh gave investigators multiple, shifting accounts of what happened next. In one version, he told police he assaulted the child inside his car on Mandi Road near Fatehpur Beri.
In another, he said he drove her to a secluded forested stretch along the Faridabad-Gurugram road, where he raped her, strangled her with a piece of cloth and struck her chest with a stone. He then concealed her body under a pile of stones in an apparent attempt to hide the crime.
Police said Singh had consumed marijuana before the abduction. Investigators are separately verifying whether he also drugged the child to prevent her from crying out.
Singh later led a police team to the crime scene around 5 pm, where the girl's body was recovered from beneath the stones. It was sent for post-mortem examination. Forensic Science Laboratory teams collected biological and material samples from both the vehicle and the spot.
The chilling aftermath
What has left investigators deeply unsettled is not just the brutality of the crime, but Singh's demeanour in the hours that followed.
After leaving the crime scene, Singh stopped on the roadside and changed out of the clothes he had been wearing — the same ones police later recovered and matched to CCTV footage.
He then drove to the Gurugram residential building where his employer lives and was captured on the building's cameras meticulously cleaning the interior of the car, apparently to remove forensic traces. A security guard at the building also spotted him there.
With the vehicle scrubbed, Singh logged back onto his cab app and accepted a fresh ride — picking up a passenger from Chakkarpur in Gurugram and dropping them in Nangloi in west Delhi — before being intercepted by police.
"He had picked up and dropped a passenger after the crime and appeared to be behaving normally, showing no indication of what he had done," a police source said.
During interrogation, Singh showed no remorse, remained largely unemotional and reportedly told police he did not regret the crime. He also claimed, at one point, that he had initially intended to return the girl to the spot where he had taken her from, but fled after spotting police in the area. Investigators have not verified this claim.
His own family members described him as aggressive by nature.
Who is Bashu Kumar Singh
Singh, a married man with two young sons in Bihar, came to the Delhi-NCR region in 2018, initially working as a security guard at a Gurugram housing society — the same one where his eventual employer, Ankit, a resident who would later finance the cab, lived.
He subsequently worked as a food delivery rider before returning to Bihar and then coming back to Gurugram, at his elder brother Jay Kishan Kumar's insistence, to drive cabs.
He was registered with at least three different aggregator platforms and obtained the white Wagon R in January this year through Ankit, who had bought the second-hand vehicle to start a cab business and handed it to Singh after his brother stood as guarantor.
"My interactions with him were mostly limited to collecting the car rental," Ankit told TOI. "What I thought would be my first business venture has ended in failure."
Just two weeks before the crime, on June 10, Singh had visited his native village in Bihar's Khagaria district to appear for a police havildar clerk recruitment examination. His brother said Singh worked long hours, often sleeping in his cab, and had stayed at the family home in Chakkarpur the night before the crime, leaving around 6.30–7 pm on Sunday.
A criminal record that went unchecked
Singh carries a criminal history spanning more than a decade. Police records show he faces five to six cases in Bihar's Khagaria district, including charges of molestation, rioting and two separate cases of attempted murder, dating back to 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2022. Singh has claimed the cases stemmed from a family land dispute, a claim investigators have not verified.
Despite this record, Singh had no apparent difficulty registering with multiple cab aggregator platforms — a failure that police are now examining closely.
Officials said they will formally write to the aggregator platforms involved, seeking details of the verification process followed while onboarding Singh, all documents he submitted, and whether any complaints were ever filed against him by passengers.
Police also plan to write to the Delhi government urging that policies on cab aggregator driver screening be made significantly stricter, so that individuals with criminal backgrounds cannot register and operate as drivers.
Police will additionally write to the South Delhi district magistrate regarding the welfare of homeless families in the area, urging the administration to establish shelter homes and bring vulnerable people — particularly women and children — into safer spaces and government welfare programmes.
He drove her to a desolate forest patch near the Faridabad-Gurugram border, raped her, strangled her with a piece of cloth, caved her chest in with a stone and buried her body under a pile of rocks — then returned to the city, changed his clothes on the roadside, scrubbed his car clean and picked up his next passenger, police said.
The accused, Bashu Kumar Singh, 29, a Bihar native who had been driving for app-based cab aggregators in the Delhi-NCR region for nearly five years, was arrested around 11 am on June 22 from Vikaspuri in west Delhi — roughly six hours after the crime — following a manhunt involving nearly 20 police teams and footage from over 200 CCTV cameras.
The abduction
The girl was sleeping beside her parents, both daily-wage labourers, on a pavement near Chattarpur metro station in Mehrauli when Singh allegedly pulled up and parked his white Wagon R hatchback nearby.
Police said he observed the family for a period before allegedly dragging the child into the vehicle around 4.15 am on Monday.
Her father woke up moments later to find his daughter gone and a vehicle speeding away. He called the police control room at 4.58 am. A kidnapping case was registered and a large-scale search operation launched immediately.
The crime
During interrogation, Singh gave investigators multiple, shifting accounts of what happened next. In one version, he told police he assaulted the child inside his car on Mandi Road near Fatehpur Beri.
In another, he said he drove her to a secluded forested stretch along the Faridabad-Gurugram road, where he raped her, strangled her with a piece of cloth and struck her chest with a stone. He then concealed her body under a pile of stones in an apparent attempt to hide the crime.
Police said Singh had consumed marijuana before the abduction. Investigators are separately verifying whether he also drugged the child to prevent her from crying out.
Singh later led a police team to the crime scene around 5 pm, where the girl's body was recovered from beneath the stones. It was sent for post-mortem examination. Forensic Science Laboratory teams collected biological and material samples from both the vehicle and the spot.
The chilling aftermath
What has left investigators deeply unsettled is not just the brutality of the crime, but Singh's demeanour in the hours that followed.
After leaving the crime scene, Singh stopped on the roadside and changed out of the clothes he had been wearing — the same ones police later recovered and matched to CCTV footage.
He then drove to the Gurugram residential building where his employer lives and was captured on the building's cameras meticulously cleaning the interior of the car, apparently to remove forensic traces. A security guard at the building also spotted him there.
With the vehicle scrubbed, Singh logged back onto his cab app and accepted a fresh ride — picking up a passenger from Chakkarpur in Gurugram and dropping them in Nangloi in west Delhi — before being intercepted by police.
"He had picked up and dropped a passenger after the crime and appeared to be behaving normally, showing no indication of what he had done," a police source said.
During interrogation, Singh showed no remorse, remained largely unemotional and reportedly told police he did not regret the crime. He also claimed, at one point, that he had initially intended to return the girl to the spot where he had taken her from, but fled after spotting police in the area. Investigators have not verified this claim.
His own family members described him as aggressive by nature.
Who is Bashu Kumar Singh
Singh, a married man with two young sons in Bihar, came to the Delhi-NCR region in 2018, initially working as a security guard at a Gurugram housing society — the same one where his eventual employer, Ankit, a resident who would later finance the cab, lived.
He subsequently worked as a food delivery rider before returning to Bihar and then coming back to Gurugram, at his elder brother Jay Kishan Kumar's insistence, to drive cabs.
He was registered with at least three different aggregator platforms and obtained the white Wagon R in January this year through Ankit, who had bought the second-hand vehicle to start a cab business and handed it to Singh after his brother stood as guarantor.
"My interactions with him were mostly limited to collecting the car rental," Ankit told TOI. "What I thought would be my first business venture has ended in failure."
Just two weeks before the crime, on June 10, Singh had visited his native village in Bihar's Khagaria district to appear for a police havildar clerk recruitment examination. His brother said Singh worked long hours, often sleeping in his cab, and had stayed at the family home in Chakkarpur the night before the crime, leaving around 6.30–7 pm on Sunday.
A criminal record that went unchecked
Singh carries a criminal history spanning more than a decade. Police records show he faces five to six cases in Bihar's Khagaria district, including charges of molestation, rioting and two separate cases of attempted murder, dating back to 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2022. Singh has claimed the cases stemmed from a family land dispute, a claim investigators have not verified.
Despite this record, Singh had no apparent difficulty registering with multiple cab aggregator platforms — a failure that police are now examining closely.
Officials said they will formally write to the aggregator platforms involved, seeking details of the verification process followed while onboarding Singh, all documents he submitted, and whether any complaints were ever filed against him by passengers.
Police also plan to write to the Delhi government urging that policies on cab aggregator driver screening be made significantly stricter, so that individuals with criminal backgrounds cannot register and operate as drivers.
Police will additionally write to the South Delhi district magistrate regarding the welfare of homeless families in the area, urging the administration to establish shelter homes and bring vulnerable people — particularly women and children — into safer spaces and government welfare programmes.
Next Story